Long Shadow Of Fdr

Roosevelt Laid Foundation Of Empire That Still Stands

April 09, 1995|By Craig Crawford, Orlando Sentinel.

For two hours on the afternoon of April 12, 1945, in the corner bedroom of a modest wooden cottage in Georgia, the dying man struggled for breath. At 3:35 p.m., "the silencing of the dreadful breathing was a signal that the end had come."

So wrote an aide in his diary about the moment 50 years ago Wednesday that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died.

At that moment, Vice President Harry S. Truman was having a drink in the private office of House Speaker Sam Rayburn. The phone rang.

It was a rare summons for Truman to come to the White House "as quickly and as quietly" as he could.

"Jesus Christ and General Jackson!" Truman blurted.

Within the hour, the news was broadcast around the world.

"After 12 years it is difficult to imagine the city without the president," NBC radio announcer Richard Harkness said, "because Franklin Roosevelt was the Capital."

Fifty years later, he almost still is. The social and military bureaucracy he unleashed, born in economic depression and shaped by world war, is the subject of today's headlines as it undergoes re-examination by the winners of the most recent election.

Washington now spends 16 times what it spent in 1945 at the war's peak. In 1940, federal taxes topped $67 billion in today's dollars. Today, the Treasury collects $1 trillion, a 15-fold increase from the early years of Roosevelt's presidency.

The Federal Register grew from 5,307 pages of rules and regulations in 1940 to 68,101 pages last year. Over the same time, the government's payroll tripled to more than 2 million permanent military and civilian workers-the population of Miami. Most of that growth came in the first five years.

In his first term, Roosevelt created 30 federal agencies, many of them now name-brand institutions-the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (1933), Federal Communications Commission (1934), Social Security Administration (1935). The federal government now spends half of its entire annual budget on Social Security and other entitlement programs started under or inspired by Roosevelt's New Deal.

The military's portion of today's federal budget has shrunk to what it was before World War II-about 17 percent in 1940 and in 1995. But what a ride the Pentagon had between those years, claiming as much as 90 percent of the budget during the war, 70 percent at the peak of the Cold War and 46 percent during the war in Vietnam.

The foundation of today's Washington empire was built in the later years of FDR's presidency, when he consolidated much of the nation's economy under wartime federal control.

Offering profitable contracts, Roosevelt enticed America's manufacturers to produce staggering results: 300,000 warplanes, 2 million trucks, 107,351 tanks, 87,620 warships, 5,475 cargo ships, 20 million firearms, 44 million rounds of ammunition. America's 10 biggest corporations won a third of the war contracts, spawning a military industry that still exists a half century later. Other companies such as Coca-Cola Co. and Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. became international giants, thanks to military monopolies for their soft drink and gum.

The defense buildup for the war joined political and military leaders in a pact with industry that fed the economy for decades. But first it took Truman to rescue defense from a post-World War II plunge in military spending, which fell from 40 percent of the gross domestic product in 1945 to 4 percent in 1947. In so doing, Truman would divert FDR's legacy from what Roosevelt wanted.

The Truman Doctrine, announced in 1947, bound the United States to defend "free peoples" anywhere against communism. Military spending soared again, reaching 15 percent of GDP in the Korean War. A decade later, the Vietnam War boosted military budgets, which since have shrunk.

Over the last five decades, the Pentagon's growth rate has been slower than widely believed-averaging less than 3 percent a year-but its political influence has been undeniable. Military spending sustained the careers of many politicians, prominent among them Lyndon Johnson, who won lucrative projects for their home states.

As a young congressman, Johnson would draft telegrams for Roosevelt to send to him announcing plans for defense construction in his district. As a senator and president, he would teach other politicians how to maximize Pentagon pork, a favor he could exchange for votes in support of the escalation of the Vietnam War.

War-sustained industry and employment carry a shocking price tag. If Americans had to spend in today's dollars what they paid for World War II, the bill would be more than $3 trillion.